Design Exploration with AI

When I created piratemoo, the goal was simple: a space to post write-ups, notes, and ideas on the web. I'd often imagine what the site could be, but between work, parenting, self-study and life, time has never been on my side.

With that said, I blew a weekend on AI exploration with basic design principles to evaluate how well-adjusted it was for my general purposes. Here are some things I've learned along the way:

While I was able to play with a variety of ideas and mockups at a much faster pace, I can't say I feel like less time was spent doing so. It actually felt like the opposite. I realized I expended more energy catering to details.

Most designs created with AI look extremely generic. My goal was to avoid this at all costs and not create something that looked like a copy-paste off the web. I wanted the site to feel more like an organic adventure with fun easter eggs.

The challenges were in the minor details (where the devil is). Things still tend to break in very much the same way.

General advice around prompting mirrors coding conventions with being specific/precise. I chose to break this rule with more open-ended prompts to elicit different responses for graphics. This immensely helped explore different directions. Sometimes, less really is more.

Imperfection can be viewed artistically: A marker that comes with creating AI-generated design that should be explored instead of looked at with such disdain. Obviously, it doesn't suite every purpose, but imperfections can be just as interesting and inspiring.

There is a tendency to frame AI as a replacement for human creativity, but that wasn't my experience. My goal was simply to give my ideas a digital presence and AI helped me do that. There are valid arguments I don't want to dismiss, but I also dislike reducing everything to a single narrative.

Approaching projects as both designer/developer is the way to do this. Build the layout, but create visual elements separately, so you don't end up with great ideas that become a struggle to implement. AI can accelerate ideas, but it shouldn't replace natural curiosity/creativity.